Iran responded to Israel’s airstrike by launching over 100 drones toward Israel on Friday morning.
The drone deployment came as retaliation for Israel’s Operation Rising Lion, which targeted Iran’s nuclear program in a military airstrike on Thursday. The preemptive attack centered on “dozens of military targets, including nuclear targets in different areas of Iran.”
The airstrike was devastating for Iran, which suffered significant casualties among its country’s leadership. Several prominent military heads were killed in the strike, including Gen. Hossein Salami, the chief commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Gholam Ali Rashid, a senior Guard commander. Iranian nuclear scientists Fereydoon Abbasi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, and Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, a theoretical physicist, were also killed in the attack.
Iranian state media also reportedly claimed that children were killed in “at least one of the airstrikes.”
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, confirmed the deaths and warned that Israel would endure “severe punishment” as a result of the attack in a series of posts on X.
“Zionist regime has committed a crime in our dear country today at dawn with its satanic, bloodstained hands,” Khamenei said. “It has revealed its malicious nature even more than before by targeting residential areas.”
“That [Zionist] regime should anticipate a severe punishment. By God’s grace, the powerful arm of the Islamic Republic’s Armed Forces won’t let them go unpunished,” he added. “With this crime, the Zionist regime has prepared for itself a bitter, painful fate, which it will definitely see.”
Israel Defense Forces confirmed the launch of Iran’s drones on Friday. It announced it had already begun to intercept some of them and shoot them down. Drones fired from Iran must travel a great distance and take several hours to get to Israel, according to multiple reports.
“The IDF has begun intercepting UAVs fired from Iran, outside of Israeli territory,” an IDF official told CNN.
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IDF Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin said all of Israel’s “defense systems are working to intercept the threats.”
Multiple countries reported intercepting Iranian drones overnight, including Jordanian, Israeli, Saudi Arabian, and U.S. Air Forces.
